Twitter Me This! A Tutorial for 2008 NTC Attendees Presented by: Rosie de Fremery Director of Management Information Systems American Jewish World Service Kari Peterson Consultant and Official NTC Twitterator What’s covered in this tutorial What Twitter is How it works

Presentation Transcript

Twitter Me This! A Tutorial for 2008 NTC Attendees Presented by: Rosie de Fremery Director of Management Information Systems American Jewish World Service Kari Peterson Consultant and Official NTC Twitterator

What’s covered in this tutorial • What Twitter is • How it works • Options for sending and receiving updates • Using Twitter at the 2008 NTC • Further resources • Q&A and wrap-up: Tweet you @08NTC!

What is Twitter? Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service You log in and fill in the box that asks, "what are you doing now?" You're limited to 140 characters Your message posts to your Twitter page and the public timeline. People notice your post and subscribe to your updates by following you

Twitter’s good for: • Linking up with a community of people who share your interests. You can get to know your nonprofit tech colleagues and trade tips before the NTC even starts • Live event reporting: finding out what people are taking away from conferences, debates, sporting events, etc., in real time • Sharing vignettes from your life with people who want to hear what you’re up to

A brief history of Twitter Twitter was launched by San Francisco start-up Obvious, LLC in October 2006 Twitter was written in Ruby on Rails It rapidly gained popularity and won the 2007 SXSW Web Award in the blog category. Twitter replied: "We'd like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!”

Twitter lingo for newbies • Tweet: to post an update on Twitter • Tweet(s): a person or people you know through Twitter • Followers: the people who subscribe to your updates • DM: Direct Message – a private message sent through Twitter

Getting started on Twitter • Hop on over to twitter.com • Set yourself up with an account by clicking on the green “Get Started – Join!” button

Getting started on Twitter • Once logged in, type what you’re doing in 140 characters or less • Click update and voilà! Your update will be broadcast to your followers & the public timeline

Finding people on Twitter • There are a few ways to find people on Twitter. One is to use the Find & Follow feature to scan your Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail address book as seen here:

Finding people on Twitter • To find fellow NTC attendees, check out the list of people the @08NTC Twitter account follows. See the green pane at right:

Talking to people on Twitter • You can message someone publicly by putting an @ in front of their name in your update. This is visible on your Twitter page and is posted to the public timeline

Talking to people on Twitter • You can also privately message someone via DM (Direct Message) using the link on that person’s profile as seen at the bottom right here: • And then in the next page here:

What nonprofit tech people are talking about on Twitter • It runs the gamut! Recent tweets observed covered the following topics: • Nonprofit applications for SalesForce • Essays on women and mobile technology • NetSquared mashups • The recent SXSW conference • New Orleans: recommendations for restaurants, hotels, places to visit • And of course random miscellanea as well

Twitter at the 2008 NTC • Oh yes we will be a-Twitter at the NTC! To join in the fun, make sure to follow the @08NTC Twitter account • You'll get up the the minute announcements on NTC news from @08NTC (maintained by NTEN staff) • You'll get up to the minute news and observations from your other NTCers who are tweeting; this is the NTC "back channel"

Follow and be followed: How to track the conference • If you send an update that contains, "@08NTC" anywhere in its text, your tweet will get "re-tweeted" to all who follow @08NTC • If you visit the @08NTC page and click on "with friends," you will see all the posts of all the people @08NTC follows (which is all who follow @08NTC) • If you go to hashtags.org/tag/08NTC, you'll also see all the tweets posted about NTC, provided the author put the hashtag "#08NTC" in the update There are three ways to follow the action and be followed:

What are Hashtags? Hashtags is a service set up for the Twitter community at large that allows people to sort their tweets using tags and archive them in a centralized place. We've set up a hashtag archive for 08NTC by establishing the tag #08NTC. To use "Hashtags" you must do 3 things: • Go to http://hashtags.org/tag/08NTC/ (here you can view the archivewithout doing anything) • Go to the Hashtags account on Twitter, http://twitter.com/hashtagsand "follow" @hashtags. You will now be part of the Hashtag group andyour hashtagged tweets will get included in the Hashtag archive • If you want your NTC tweets to be included in the archiveyou must, somewhere in the text, include the string #08NTC.That will flag the tweet and locate it within the Hashtagarchive, but for this to happen, you have to do the above steps

Your presence on Twitter • Once you have a Twitter account you also have your own Twitter page • You can direct people to your Twitter URL (e.g. http://twitter.com//08ntc for the @08NTC Twitter account)

Take Twitter with you • You can send and receive updates from your cell phone by configuring it in the Settings area of your account:

Other ways you can use Twitter • From your cell phone: you can ask Twitter to track mention of a certain topic like ‘nptech’ or ‘#08ntc’ by sending the command “track nptech” or “track #08ntc” to 40404 • Any posts that include those terms will be sent to your cell phone • You can do the same in IM • This feature isn’t available via the web

Twitter’s privacy settings • If you don’t want your updates to post to the public timeline and you don’t want people to be able to follow you without permission, you can lock your profile

Some other points on privacy • If your profile is not restricted then your tweets will be visible in Google search results • If the email address you used to sign up for Twitter is in someone’s address book, they can find you via the “Find & Follow” tool (of course this can be a good thing – depends on how low/high a profile you want to keep!)

Twitter being Twitter • Twitter does go offline without warning, often during major events like Steve Jobs’ recent keynote. Don’t be surprised if you see this:

Twitter tech support … is minimal. They’re hiring right now but in the meantime replies to your tech support requests could take some time and you may find yourself surfing this community discussion group to find answers to your questions:

Twitter software Once you get your sea legs using Twitter on the web you can try out some software: • Twhirl, Snitter, Twitterific for starters • Plug-ins for Firefox, other web browsers • You can also use Twitter in Second Life and through Safari on an iPhone

More Twitter resources Here are some links to get you started. We’ll post them on the NTEN site as well: • Beth Kanter’s Twitter Primer: http://bethkanter.wikispaces.com/twitter_primer • Twitter Fan Wiki – compendium of resources - http://twitter.pbwiki.com/ • CommonCraft’s “Twitter in Plain English” video -http://www.commoncraft.com/Twitter • Tweetscan.com – search for tweets on a topic

NTC Sessions Covering Twitter • “Building, Growing, and Sustaining a Vibrant Online Community – How to Reach Beyond Traditional Tools into the Web 2.0 Sphere” – Friday 3/21 at 10:30AM • Other sessions in the Web 2.0 track as well

If you have questions Feel free to look us up on Twitter! We’re at @rosiedefremery and @kariapeterson, respectively